Saturday, May 09, 2015

'Stay quiet and you'll be okay:' Mark Steyn on Pamela Geller

I'll have more to say about the elections in the days ahead, but for
now let me offer a whole-hearted good riddance to Ed Miliband, the now
departed Labour leader who, in a desperate last-minute pander, offered
to "outlaw Islamophobia".
That was the British political establishment's contribution to a rough
couple of weeks for free speech, culminating in the attempted mass
murder in Garland, Texas.

It'll be a long time before you see "Washington Post Offers No
Apology for Attacking Target of Thwarted Attack" or "AP Says It Has No
Regrets After Blaming The Victim". The respectable class in the American
media share the same goal as the Islamic fanatics: They want to silence
Pam Geller. To be sure, they have a mild disagreement about the means
to that end - although even then you get the feeling, as with Garry
Trudeau and those dozens of PEN novelists' reaction to Charlie Hebdo,
that the "narrative" wouldn't change very much if the jihad boys had
got luckier and Pam, Geert Wilders, Robert Spencer and a dozen others
were all piled up in the Garland morgue.

If the American press were not so lazy and parochial, they would
understand that this was the third Islamic attack on free speech this
year - first, Charlie Hebdo in Paris; second, the Lars Vilks event in Copenhagen; and now Texas. The difference in the corpse count is easily explained by a look at the video of the Paris gunmen, or the bullet holes they put in the police car.
The French and Texan attackers supposedly had the same kind of weapons,
although one should always treat American media reports with a high
degree of skepticism when it comes to early identification of "assault
weapons" and "AK47s". Nonetheless, from this reconstruction,
it seems clear that the key distinction between the two attacks is that
in Paris they knew how to use their firepower and in Garland they
didn't. So a very cool 60-year-old local cop with nothing but his
service pistol advanced under fire and took down two guys whose heavier
firepower managed only to put a bullet in an unarmed security guard's
foot.

The Charlie Hebdo killers had received effective training
overseas - as thousands of ISIS recruits with western passports are
getting right now. What if the Garland gunmen had been as good as the
Paris gunmen? Surely that would be a more interesting question for the
somnolent American media than whether some lippy Jewess was asking for
it.

...

In Copenhagen, in Paris, in Garland, what's more important than the
cartoons and the attacks is the reaction of all the polite, respectable
people in society, which for a decade now has told those who do not
accept the messy, fractious liberties of free peoples that we don't
really believe in them, either, and we're happy to give them up -
quietly, furtively, incrementally, remorselessly - in hopes of a quiet
life. Because a small Danish newspaper found itself abandoned and alone,
Charlie Hebdo jumped in to support them. Because the Charlie Hebdo
artists and writers died abandoned and alone, Pamela Geller jumped in
to support them. By refusing to share the risk, we are increasing the
risk. It's not Pamela Geller who emboldens Islamic fanatics, it's all
the nice types - the ones Salman Rushdie calls the But Brigade. You've
heard them a zillion times this last week: "Of course, I'm personally,
passionately, absolutely committed to free speech. But..."

And the minute you hear the "but", none of the build-up to it
matters. A couple of days before Garland, Canadian Liberal MP (and
former Justice Minister) Irwin Cotler announced his plan to restore
Section 13 - the "hate speech" law under which Maclean's and I
were dragged before the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission and which, as
a result of my case, was repealed by the Parliament of Canada. At the
time Mr Cotler was fairly torn on the issue. We talked about it briefly
at a free-speech event in Ottawa at which he chanced to be present, and
he made vaguely supportive murmurings - as he did when we ran into each
other a couple of years later in Boston. Mr Cotler is Jewish and, even
as European "hate" laws prove utterly useless against the metastasizing
open Jew-hate on the Continent, he thinks we should give 'em one more
try. He's more sophisticated than your average But boy, so he uses a three-syllable word.

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About Me

I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com